The Agony and the Ecstasy of Father Ferro

As it turns out, leaving was the easy part.

When my not exactly beloved husband confided that he was going to take the considerable funds the Vatican had endowed him with to go and slay the heretics in Protestant Europe (in God’s Holy name, of course), I agreed to follow him into hiding in Italy for a lack of better options for myself. 

When I asked him about the undoubtedly elaborated ruse he’d devised to sneak me off the estate, he burst out laughing and took several long and deliberate moments to compose himself.

“Are you serious?” he gasped with what I felt was an unnecessary and impolite amount of mirth. 

‘It’ll take them days, if not weeks to realize you’re even gone! We'll probably be well settled in Italy before anyone even thinks to check your chambers for signs of life.”

He wiped his eyes and took a long sip of his wine. Even as the wife of a dashing knight off to slay the heretics, my standing in our household and the kingdom ranked somewhere below the dogs and (possibly) above the hogs.

And so it was that I found myself on the open road with my renegade knight, traveling under the cover of darkness to some mysterious underground world in Italy that he had yet to fully explain to me.

That's how I came to make the acquaintance of Father Ferro, one of the first fellow refugees and purest souls I’d meet on our adventure.

As a young cleric, Father Ferro had displayed the type of blind idealism and bottomless empathy that had made him both a joke and something of a subtle threat among his fellow Jesuits. Unlike the vast majority of his brothers in the Church and members of the flock, Father Ferro saw love, peace, and joy as the deep heart of the Gospel - where the rest saw war, violence, and conquest.

Father Ferro, bless his poor misguided soul, was a true believer. 

His unwavering faith, and unwillingness to "just shut the fuck up about it" as his Bishop had informed him, was the catalyst for a cosmic chain of events that had put us together in an errant fugitive camp in search for safety and freedom in Italy. 

Father Ferro’s problems started when he decided to speak up and suggest what he thought was an obvious solution to the ongoing bloodshed between the Catholics and Protestants. “So what you’re saying is that we should just be cowards and let the heretics win?,” his superiors had roared when he opined that retaliatory murder was probably not what Jesus had in mind when he asked us to turn the other cheek.

He’d had the sense to bring it up at the weekly card game, wrongly assuming that the wine and Church sanctioned usury and money changing might have softened their spirits towards a gentler view of their neighbors and fellow Christians (even if they were “sour faced Germanic fucking blasphemers.") 

But before Father Ferro could ask for penance and live to preach his heresy to another congregation of God’s bloodthirsty little lambs, he found himself on a ship bound for the New World. “He’ll be perfect among the savages,” the Cardinal laughed, “they won’t understand a word that comes out of his mouth!”

As Father Ferro quietly told me his story over the campfire that first night, I struggled to imagine how such a gentle and earnest soul had managed to survive the wrath of the Church, let alone the New World. He had the soft, delicate voice of a healer and deep, warm brown eyes that suggested they had once brimmed with light and joy which had since been snuffed out by sadness and terror. 

“The truth is I wanted to go to the New World,” he said, shyly taking a sip as I passed him my jug of wine. “I saw it as a fresh start, and a real opportunity to spread the Gospel in its truest form.” 

As a boy in Portugal, Father Ferro’s young soul had been consumed by two things: fishing and the Bible. He saw himself as a fisher of men, a humble apostle modeled in the image of our Lord himself.

Poor bastard. I instantly knew that his story wasn’t going to end well. 

Despite a difficult journey, full of stormy seas and darkness which Father Ferro obediently and joyfully accepted as an obligatory passage through Purgatory (of course), his Faith and obedience was confirmed when he first set eyes on the shores of the New World - nothing short of paradise on Earth, the manifestation of God’s master design and love for His people.

However his shipmates and fellow clergymen saw it differently of course. Despite the fact that what little of what I’d heard about the New World suggested that the heathens possessed mathematical, design, and construction skills far superior to our own, the pilgrims saw such inexplicable (to them) technological and cultural advancements as a sign that the New Worlders were surely in cahoots with the devil.

But even Father Ferro’s idealism had its limits, and he soon came to realize that his vision of a community of believers sitting together at one table breaking bread and wine as equals in Christ, was not in line with his companions' own ideas about their place in this new land.

Father Ferro didn’t view his role so much as a conqueror, but more as a humble teacher, willing and eager to welcome his new brothers and sisters to the faith just as Jesus Himself had done when he broke bread with the whores and tax collectors. 

Sickened to his soul by what he was witnessing, Father Ferro took to the shore one afternoon to take a walk to pray and be alone with God to gather his thoughts. He found a spot by the sea where the shade of the strange new world trees were punctuated by angles of sunlight, giving the water a glistening, celestial effect.

He took out his precious rosary beads, which were as priceless in sentimental value as they were in worldly value. They were made from precious antique pearls, a gift from his beloved grandmother and the only person who hadn’t treated him with contempt and slit eyed suspicion when he’d shown more interest in prayer and women’s jewelry as a boy than in boyhood games of war and domestic violence.

(What Father Ferro didn’t know was that the only reason he’d been admitted to the priesthood in the first place was because his beloved grandmother had struck a quiet deal with the parish to bequeath her impressive jewelry collection, which was rumored to include a few royal gifts, on the condition that they accept her Francisco and allow him to keep his pearls). 

Caught up in a state of near rapture at the memory of his beloved grandmother and the feel of the beads through his fingers and the familiar words of the Rosary on his lips, Father Ferro failed to notice the arrival of a young native man who stood and watched him with what looked like amusement (though the knuckles on the hand grasping his spear were white with anticipation).

Father Ferro jumped up and brushed the sand from his frock, bending to pick up his beads in a swift movement that the boy must have mistaken for a bow. Father Ferro held out the beads as something of a symbolic peace offering, hoping for the Virgin Mother’s intercession on behalf of himself and his new friend. 

The boy reached out for the beads and ran them through his fingers with clear admiration (in addition to building complex cities the “savages” were also expert craftspeople with a keen eye for finery.)

He handed the beads back to Father Ferro and motioned for him to follow him. He told me that he felt great shame for the instant of panic that consumed him as he considered that the boy might harm him. But as our Savior entered the leper colony, so too would he, Father Francisco Ferro, a mere servant of God.

The boy led him to what looked like a massive outdoor banquet, the likes of which Father Ferro had never seen back on the continent. Men, women, children, old, young, and in between were celebrating together, without obvious demarcations of rank, wealth, or status.

Some eyed Father Ferro warily, but he felt no malice or danger. 

The boy held out his hand for the rosary and showed it to a poised older woman wearing several elaborate pieces of her own. They passed the rosary beads around, shaking their heads with what Father Ferro interpreted as admiration.

He couldn’t believe his luck! 

This could be nothing but divine intervention, a sign that the table of God’s banquet was set here on earth and open to all of them, Christian and heathen alike!

At this point in the story, Father Ferro’s demeanor changed and he took a deeper sip of the wine, without bothering to apologize or feign temperance. He handed it back to me and stared into the fire, as if the next part of the story was dancing inside the flames.

“That’s when they presented me with the gift,” he said, his voice cracking as if he was choking back tears.

“They call it cacao, an almost mystical type of bean plant for its value as both a delicacy and a form of currency they used to trade. It was unbelievable! Some pieces were carved into exquisite mini artworks, while it was also drank as a dark and creamy nectar. It was the closest I’ve ever come to witnessing alchemy firsthand."

He crossed himself for good measure.

“But I knew that God led me to my new friends for a reason, and the cacao was a gift, and as such accepting it as their humble servant was a sign of respect." He took another long sip of wine.

"And that’s when the first wave of torches appeared.”

Father Ferro broke down in tears, and it took great patience and more wine to coax the rest of the story out of him. Unbeknownst to him, the Jesuits were having him followed for evidence that his loyalties did not lie with the Crown (heavenly or otherwise). 

Father Ferro was charged with “fraternization with heathens” and immediately arrested. His new friends appeared confused at first, and barely had time to run as Father Ferro was dragged away and the torches began to burn everything in their path.

He was dragged back to their camp through a wave of black smoke, and eventually put back on the ship back to Spain, where he would undoubtedly face a smoky and fiery death of his own.

(The irony of what was probably the only two actual virgins in our camp being sent into exile for fraternization and fornication wasn’t lost on me, but I decided to keep that to myself.)

Tossed below deck like a common criminal, Father Ferro told me that he cried so hard and so long that he thought he’d flood and sink the ship with his own tears. 

He had actually believed for a moment that he and his new friends had found the recipe for utopia in the New World, bringing the peace, joy, and brotherly love of the Gospel to life with a pair of rosary beads and an exotic sweet liquid bean plant that could also be used as money. 

He had touched it; he had tasted it. He was so lost in his grief and consumed by longing that he swore he could actually smell the cacao. How could something so sweet, so unifying, be “tokens of the devil’s currency” as his accusers had called it? How could his soul "already be in hell” simply by touching and tasting the cacao?

After a short and fitful sleep, Father Ferro woke up to find that the smell of cacao was stronger than before. That’s when he noticed a wide crack between two of the wooden slats in the floor where some hungry rats had attempted to fill their bloated stomachs.

He peeked through the slats and couldn’t believe his eyes. Hundreds if not thousands of cases of the cacao stacked three and four deep!

It seemed the “devil’s currency” was not too evil or corrupting to be relieved from its rightful owners and put onto the ship for passage back to Spain.

Or maybe they were just transporting the evidence back for Father Ferro’s trial?

I took a very long gulp of wine and silently passed the jug back to my new friend.